Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits

Vietnam, China to make another film on Ho Chi Minh

Vietnam and China will co-produce a second film on late Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, Hanh trinh qua ba be (Journey across three oceans), starting early next year. The director of a film studio owned by the Vietnamese Writers Association, Ha Pham Phu, said it would be based on the life of Uncle Ho during the period when he went to the Soviet Union from Hong Kong where he received plenty of help to elude enemy spies. The 100-minute feature, to cost over VND10 billion (U

History is scary in Milos Forman's 'Goya's Ghosts'

Even though he is regularly offered high-profile scripts other filmmakers would kill for, Milos Forman has made only seven films in the three decades since he took home his first Academy Award for his 1975 film "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." The notoriously choosy director admits that the more than 50 years it's taken for his new historical epic "Goya's Ghosts" to make it to the screen is slow even by his unhurried standard. "I know it's a long time,&quo

History Channel's biggest hit: A series about truckers

Just how big is Ice Road Truckers? The debut episode last month drew 3.4 million viewers, a record for the History Channel. Subsequent episodes have retained as much as 90 percent of that audience. The majority of viewers are men - probably the same guys who made Deadliest Catch a success for the Discovery Channel. "We knew we were on to something different," said Dolores Gavin, the show's executive producer. "There was an energy around this that was very unique and

Rich history of Negro Leagues unfolds

BALTIMORE -- Orioles fans have no problem recognizing the familiar black and orange shades of their team's jersey or the faces of Brian Roberts, Erik Bedard or Miguel Tejada. But entering the traveling "Times of Greatness" exhibition at Camden Yards this weekend, fans become part of a completely different side of baseball in Charm City. The first window into the past inside the 18-wheeler museum holds a Baltimore Elite Giants jersey with red and black cursive letters, baseball c

Classic image of Queen honoured

A classic image of the Queen which has featured on some 200 billion stamps is being celebrated in an exhibition. The British Postal Museum and Archive (BPMA) show opens at the Royal College of Art in London on Thursday. Arnold Machin's headshot of Queen Elizabeth II marks its 40th anniversary this year and is thought to be the most produced stamp portrait of all time. The exhibition traces the development of the design from its inspiration in the Victorian Penny

Hamburg museum collects artifacts that document the migration to Americas

Edith Kolb was shuffling through some papers recently when a few postcards dropped out. On the front were paintings of turn-of-the-century steamships chugging through oceans full of whitecaps. On the back of one, in smudged handwriting, was a note from her uncle to her father in Kiel, Germany, informing him of his safe arrival in Buenos Aires. “It seemed such a shame to throw them away,” said Ms. Kolb, who is in her 70s. So she stopped by Hamburg’s newest museum, the BallinStadt, wh

The Superhero as Society’s Mirror, From World War II to Ira

Michael E. Uslan is a lifelong comic-book fan, but “crusader” might be more accurate. For years, Mr. Uslan, a film producer (“Batman Begins,” among others), has collected comics and original art, written books about the industry and produced movies about his muscled and macabre childhood heroes. So it is of no little excitement to him that part of his collection will be included in a bona fide art exhibition that opens Saturday: “Reflecting Culture: The Evolution of American Comic B

Copy of Hitler HQ built for Cruise film near Berlin

A replica of Adolf Hitler's secret wartime HQ was being built near Berlin Wednesday with just a week to go before filming of a controversial Tom Cruise movie begins, a civic official said. Cruise is to play the chief plotter in the true story about a vain bid to assassinate Hitler with a bomb in 1944. The film team have been banned from the Berlin building where the plotter, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, was executed by Nazi firing squad. Officially this is because of

Appomattox--the Musical!!

SAN FRANCISCO OPERA announces a public casting call for volunteer supernumeraries for the Company’s October 2007 world premiere production of Philip Glass’s APPOMATTOX. The public casting call will take place on Saturday, June 30th from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. in ZELLERBACH A REHEARSAL HALL – located at 300 Franklin Street, corner of Hayes and Franklin, San Francisco. Men, women, and children are needed to portray supernumerary Civil War soldiers and refugees. Acting/performing arts

Dylan Thomas home sold at auction

One of Dylan Thomas's former seaside homes, which attracted leading writers and artists, has been sold at auction for 232,000 pounds. The poet spent some of the happiest years of his life living at Sea View in Laugharne with his wife Caitlin. Described as a "doll's house" by artist Augustus John, the final bid for the Grade II listed property exceeded the 200,000 pounds guide price.

Jim Morrison 'died in nightclub lavatory'

A new book claims to reveal the truth about the death of Jim Morrison, the singer of the rock group The Doors, after decades of rumours. Officially, Morrison is said to have died of heart failure in his bath at the age of 27. But 36 years later, a former manager of a Paris nightclub is telling a different story. Sam Bernett claims he found Morrison's body in a lavatory cubicle at the venue after what he believes was a heroin overdose. He says in his book T

Virgin queen and love triangle with Sir Walter (Movie)

Putting matters of state before affairs of the heart earned Elizabeth I the title of the Virgin Queen. However, a Hollywood film is about to claim that she was so in love with Sir Walter Raleigh that she had one of her ladies-in-waiting seduce him so she could live out her own sexual fantasies. Elizabeth The Golden Age will claim that an infatuated Queen Elizabeth, played by Cate Blanchett, longed for a physical relationship with Raleigh, played by Clive Owen, but held

Abel Gance's 'Napoléon' to be shown in LA for Bastille Day

To mark Bastille Day, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will screen Abel Gance's legendary 1927 epic "Napoléon," which has rarely been shown publicly since its 1981 restoration by film historian Kevin Brownlow, complete with tinted sequences, and presented by Francis Ford Coppola with a score composed by Coppola's late father, Carmine, that is as glorious as the silent classic is itself. (Brownlow also completed a five-hour version in 2004.) On Friday and Saturday at 7

New documentary narrated by Sean Penn compares Bush with LBJ and Nixon war talk

While debate over Iraq intensifies in Washington, a new film's rarely-seen archival footage shows that current arguments against withdrawing U.S. troops are eerily reminiscent of persistent claims from the Johnson and Nixon administrations during the Vietnam War.Parallels emerge sharply in the documentary, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." Striking footage of Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush p

Cradle of Rock? Two Towns Stake Their Claims (NJ)

Wildwood, NJ Dick Richards was pounding the drums and thinking of the girls on the beach. It was Saturday night during Memorial Day weekend in 1954, and more than 500 people were jammed into the HofBrau Hotel here to hear his band, the Comets, kick off the summer. “We had just recorded this song in April,” he said, “and that night we introduced it to the crowd. I guess that was the first real night of rock ’n’ roll.” The song was “Rock Around the Clock,” by Bill Haley

New film, Strike, tells the story of the strike that led to the victory of Solidarity

This fictionalized biopic of a respected Polish labor activist is nicely balanced between the political and the personal. "Strike" tells how the dismissal of aging crane operator Anna Walentynowicz (who's renamed Agnieszka in the film) provided the spark for the Solidarity trade union. Solidarnosc would later effectively bring down the Communist government in Poland. This film, directed by Germany's Volker Schloendorff, explains the politics clearly, but still leaves room

Revival of Morning Star, a play about an immigrant family on the Lower East Side (NYC)

When “Morning Star” opened on Broadway in 1940, featuring the Yiddish theater star Molly Picon and a young Sidney Lumet, its portrait of a Jewish widow stoically enduring the death and disaster brought by the major events of recent history (from 1910 to 1931) sent a hopeful message to audiences desperately in need of one. As the play’s audiences followed the Nazis’ march through Europe, here was a woman, Becky Felderman, who refused to give in. For most audiences today, Sylvia Regan

Instead of Making Films About the Civil Rights Era, Hollywood Has Made Excuses

Sometimes it takes the briefest glimpse of something to make its absence so scandalously obvious. Consider: Midway through the film "Talk to Me," which opens Friday and stars Don Cheadle as the legendary Washington disc jockey Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene, a remarkable scene transpires in which, in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Greene tries to calm a city in flames. As the sequence plays, and the fires climb higher on 14th and U, it becom

Key West Commission Moves to Protect Ernest Hemingway's Famed 6-Toed Cats

KEY WEST, Fla. — City officials have sided with Ernest Hemingway's former home and its celebrated six-toed felines in its catfight with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Key West City Commission exempted the home from a city law prohibiting more than four domestic animals per household. About 50 cats live there. The house has been locked in a dispute with the USDA, which claims the museum is an "exhibitor" of cats and needs a special license, a clwritea

Smut: The Earliest Recordings

IN 1997 Bruce Young, a collector of memorabilia from the early phonograph era, placed a newly acquired 100-year-old wax cylinder record on his Edison Standard Model D player and heard a surprising sound: a young man saying filthy words. It was a 2 minute 25 second poetic recitation, suggestively titled “The Virtues of Raw Oysters,” written in the voice of a sexually voracious woman. “I never had it but twice in my life/Make me, just for tonight, your dear little wife,” went one of the few lines